Healthy Relationships and Complex Trauma: Why Healthy Relationships are a Privilege
Why many people with complex trauma struggle to recognise healthy relationships
Are you surprised by what your clients don’t know about relationships?
I recall a very sensible adult client coming to a session and describing exploitative behaviour that they saw on a television show, and asking if I thought it was ok. (It was not ok!!) This person had suffered extreme relationship adversity during their formative years, and was now quite socially isolated as a self-protective strategy.
While we were exploring their question about the television show, I realised: this person had no confidence in their own judgments about people’s rights in relationships, and no sense of healthy interpersonal boundaries.
Healthy relationships are not something everybody learns growing up.
If your clients struggle to know what is and isn’t ok in relationships, find it difficult to trust their own judgement, or feel uncertain about boundaries and social connection, my Healthy Relationships course may be a helpful resource.
Have you had similar experiences with some of your clients?
Over the years that I’ve worked with people who have experienced complex trauma, I have realised that many people don’t have internalised models of healthy relationships. Some people come to treatment without having had much or any exposure to healthy relationships. This is one of the reasons why complex trauma training for therapists and trauma-informed therapy training are so important. We need to understand not only trauma itself, but also the relational knowledge that many clients never had the opportunity to develop.
That’s when I realised:
Knowing about healthy, respectful, reciprocal and safe relationships is a privilege.
Not all people have access to this knowledge. People who grow up deprived of healthy formative relational experiences grow up with internalised models of unhealthy relationships. Without healthy models for relationships, people often struggle to improve their social situation. They may miss out on developing healthy relationships because they don’t insist on them, and others develop bad habits with them. They may be drawn to the familiarity of exploitative relationships, or simply unaware that there are better alternatives out there.
In some cases, they struggle to identify unhealthy relationships, and don’t act self-protectively around unsafe people. In other cases, they avoid relationships altogether, feeling safer keeping their distance from all other people. This can result in chronic loneliness, which is a health hazard, and chronic re-traumatisation.
Healthy Relationships: A practical resource for clients and therapists
It is for these people that I developed my new course, Healthy Relationships.
The course is a comprehensive look at healthy relationships from a neuroscience and psychological perspective, and it’s full of self-help and practical wellbeing strategies.
For therapists, it provides a valuable source of relational psychoeducation to use in treatment.
For clients, it provides the information and skills needed to build internal models of healthy relationships, and to get clear about what is and is not ok in their relationships.
The course draws on therapy training grounded in neuroscience and offers practical insights that complement therapy skills for treating trauma and attachment difficulties.
What will you learn in the Healthy Relationships course?
In the course, I teach:
- Science of Healthy Relationships, with an accessible neuroscience lens, covering Polyvagal Theory, the Risks of Loneliness, Attachment Theory and how understanding your own temperament is relevant to relationship health
- A Practical Definition of Healthy Relationships, including a close look at social circles, trust and resonance, boundaries, rights and responsibilities, and the importance of showing up in relationships
- Recognising Unhealthy Relationships, understanding what distinguishes uncomfortable from dangerous relationships, and unhealthy from healthy conflict, learning about schemas, and recognising manipulation and danger signs
- How to Begin, Improve and Maintain Relationships, including self-care and self-regulation, communication skills, curating relationships and meeting people
- Self-Assessment of current relationships and social circles
For therapists interested in attachment trauma therapy training and therapeutic approaches for complex cases, the course also offers a practical framework for helping clients understand relationship health in a way that is accessible, compassionate and actionable.
Understanding healthy relationships through a neuroscience lens
Here are some details about a few key components of healthy relationships:
Understanding temperament and relationship compatibility
Perhaps it’s not obvious, but understanding our own temperament is a key part of having healthy relationships. Why? Because good relationships are about a good fit between ourselves and the other person. We need to know what we like, how we like to spend our time, and where we sit in terms of sensitivity and privacy so we can regulate ourselves well in relationships and choose people who resonate and fit well with us.
Some temperaments are well suited to a broad range of other people, and some temperaments are more sensitive and require a specific fit. Rather than shoving yourself into spaces that don’t fit you, it’s easier to figure out who you are and where you fit, and work with that to find good fits for yourself.
Curating social circles for relationship health and wellbeing
Curating refers to selecting, organising and looking after something, and curating the people in your social circle is key to having healthy relationships. Social circles exist across different levels, and it’s important that we have the right people in the right spots.
Inner Circle is usually small and includes the most trustworthy people we resonate well with. Nobody you don’t trust and whose company you don’t enjoy belongs in your inner circle. But trust can be difficult to navigate. Do you know how to figure out who to trust and who not to?
Friends are usually people that you also trust and resonate with, but there is usually less familiarity with these people than with your Inner Circle. This means there is a little less open disclosure and a little more distance. This distance may remain forever because of an incompatibility between you, or it may fade as they join your inner circle as you get to know them better, and develop more trust.
Acquaintance is where you find all the people that you have contact with but don’t yet know well, or the people that you trust and resonate less. Often there are no bad feelings with people in this group, just less closeness and less disclosure.
Not For Me is an important category in your social circles. These are people who you’ve established are not a good fit for you. This can be benign – there are no hard feelings, you just have really incompatible ways of being – or it can be more serious, say for example that person isn’t trustworthy or safe for you, and you need to work to limit your dose of that person and protect yourself.
Assessing your social circle and how you feel about it is important to ensure that the right people are in the right spots for you.
If you realise that you need to move some people out or you have vacancies, this is an opportunity to make helpful changes to your social circle.
Recognising unhealthy and problem relationships
This is such an important topic for so many complex trauma survivors, and can be what puts people off relationships in general. If we act as if everybody is safe, or as if everybody is dangerous, then we are failing to recognise problem relationships.
In reality, most people are safe enough to at least be acquainted with, but a minority of people are not safe to connect with closely. To socialise healthily, we need to recognise the people who may cause a problem for us.
Introducing DARVO (and, why recognising manipulation matters!)
I am so grateful to Jennifer Freyd and her Centre for Institutional Courage for all their great work, including coining the term and researching the phenomenon of DARVO1.
This concept is extremely valuable in helping us identify problem relationships and we all need to understand the concept, because it’s hard to see what we don’t have a concept for.
DARVO is an acronym. Its letters stand for a description of the behaviour of people who manipulate others when a problem is raised with them.
The manipulator will:
- Deny the other person’s account, regardless of whether it’s based in fact
- Attack the other person either directly or through reputational damage
- Reverse
- Victim and
- Offender, to switch themselves from the offending role to the victim role, making out the person raising the complaint as the offender and themselves as the person being attacked
These are some of the concepts I illustrate and work through in my course, Healthy Relationships.
Building healthy relationships after trauma
For many people who have experienced attachment wounds, adversity or complex trauma, learning about healthy relationships is not a luxury – it is foundational to recovery.
Understanding trust, boundaries, temperament, social circles and relationship safety can help people build healthier internal models of relationships and create more meaningful connections with others.
If this resonates with your practice, whether you are looking for practical resources for clients, wanting to deepen your understanding of neuroscience and therapy practice, or seeking continuing education for mental health professionals, my hope is that the Healthy Relationships course helps more people develop healthy internal models of relationships and build safer, more connected lives.
These are just some of the concepts explored in Healthy Relationships. To learn more about the course and explore the curriculum, please visit:
- With credit to Freyd, J.J. (1997). Violations of power, adaptive blindness, and betrayal trauma theory. Feminism & Psychology, 7, 22-32. ↩︎
Back to Dr Catherine Hynes' blog posts